“We can design proteins on a computer that have wonderful new functions. But it's too expensive to make and test them in the real world. My latest blog is about a protein printer that turns digital bits into physical molecules, using flashes of light.” https://www.readcodon.com/p/machine
Engineering RNA export for measurement and manipulation of living cells https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00689-X
Anthropic releases Claude 2: 5x cheaper than GPT-4; outperforms GPT4 on the GRE writing and HumanEval coding benchmarks; features a context window of 100,000 tokens (only available in the US and UK) https://www.anthropic.com/index/claude-2
“I've spent the last few months interviewing >60 experts in law, economics, AI, alignment, etc, on the impacts of AI, and safety interventions. Today I'm publishing my first article, showing regulation designed to increase AI safety may backfire badly!” https://www.fast.ai/posts/2023-11-07-dislightenment.html
Google is testing its medical AI chatbot at the Mayo Clinic https://www.engadget.com/google-is-testing-its-medical-ai-chatbot-at-the-mayo-clinic-102055669.html
“An unexpected benefit of AIs is to translate the millions of ancient texts no human experts will ever get to. History will deepen, if not shift.” https://bigthink.com/the-future/ai-translates-cuneiform/
A Survey of Large Language Models https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLMSurvey
Virus-like transposons cross the species barrier and drive the evolution of genetic incompatibilities https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade0705
"If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it." http://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
How seriously should we take decision theory? https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/14qpixk/how_seriously_should_we_take_decision_theory/
“We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691620964122
“Ukrainians are recovering the M2A2 Bradleys, the Leopard 2A6 and the BREM-1 recovery vehicle that were destroyed [probably repairable] by the Russians at the start of the offensive. It seems like the 47th Brigade is now fully controlling this area.” https://twitter.com/WarUpdater/status/1678755524068745218
If you are into doomscrolling check out BirthGauge on Twitter:
Lithuania is experiencing a fertility meltdown like no other country in the EU now. In June, births were down 21.2% compared to 2022, bringing the cumulative annual decline so far to 9.5%. The TFR could decline to 1.15 kids per woman, lower than Spain and lowest in the EU.
The 2022 MICS survey for Thailand found a crazy low fertility rate of 1.01 children per woman. In Bangkok city, the TFR was just 0.63 and thus barely higher than in Seoul. Thai speakers had a TFR of 0.9 and non-Thai-speakers 1.7.
China reported 9.56M births in 2022, 10% fewer than 2021. The TFR declined from 1.16 to 1.07 kids per woman and is now only half of China‘s replacement level (2.14). China's TFR reached from 0.69 in Shanghai and 0.73 in Heilongjiang to 1.95 in Tibet. Births in the first half of 2022: Henan 372,000 -9.5%; Jiaozhou, Shandong -25.5%; Hukou, Jiangxi -42%; Ningbo -11%; Dezhou -9%...27 provinces, cities and smaller local authorities...all except the city of Guiyang logged fewer births than in...2021. Twenty-two saw double-digit decreases, with some suffering roughly 30% to 40% drops.
It doesn't look much better elsewhere, except for a few places like Israel.
BRICS is a joke, guys, wake up:
- Brazil is what could happen to France after another half century of mass immigration.
- South Africa... oh, comon now! Do I really need to say anything about that?
- What has Putin accomplished after decades of ruling Russia? Stop NATO expansion? 🤣 Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg combined have a higher GDP than Russia, despite Russia having 5 times the population and huge amounts of natural resources. Russian men have the average life expectancy of third world countries.
- India has 1.5 billion people. What Indian products do you use? What cultural influence do they have? And they get their weapons from a Chinese vassal state, while fist-fighting Chinese troops.
- China hasn't even managed to steal enough technology to be at the level of the Netherlands in semiconductor technology. They are in conflict with most of their neighbors, many of whom hate them. The US is much more popular in countries like Vietnam than China. But what about their leadership? Well, their zero-COVID policy has been the most draconian and economically damaging of any country. Chinese students want to study and immigrate to the United States.
BRICS can only dream of having companies like OpenAI or SpaceX. And what little they have is often copied or stolen. Their military technology wouldn't fly without the smuggling of Western technology.
“What Indian products do you use? What cultural influence do they have?”
A good thing this isn’t easily available on Twitter or millions of the Indian wrong wing would’ve been abusing you with imperfect grammar, poor spelling and criminally negligent comprehension.